[The following excerpt is from a letter Dwight Murphey wrote
to a friend dated January 8,
1987.]

Dear **************:

…………

I am
struck, as you are, by the mysteries of life.When our daughter was three, she asked me, with all of the profundity
of children facing life fresh at that age, “isn’t it strange to be alive?”Your sense of the mysteries, and hers, and
mine, remind me of Whittaker Chambers’ having been so struck by the beautiful
complexities of his baby daughter’s ear.Existence, and eventual mortality, are indeed
very real wonders!We hardly understand
existence, or know our place in it.

An
awareness of those mysteries, however, doesn’t in my case lead me to affirm the
truth of any particular postulate that seeks to explain them.I am strongly agnostic in light of my
recognition of the mysteries, but tend toward an atheistic opposition to the
various claimants to cosmic comprehension.Why?Because men can go seriously
astray even as they pursue knowledge based on evidence; there is no end to the
absurdities and lost motion, all intellectually beyond the pale of resolution
and many tending toward the most serious divisions among people, that result
from speculation that is separated from a devotion to evidence.As meager, in many ways, as the results of
reasoning-upon-evidence may be, I am willing to take it for what it is.It offers such comprehension as is possible,
even though its refusal to enter areas where evidence is not available necessarily
puts much actual cosmic truth off limits.

Those who
see all of this as “secular humanism” seem to me to make an enormous mistake
when they say that “if you don’t believe in God, there is nothing by way of
morality to restrain you from doing whatever you want.”Nietzsche gave this line of thinking a lot of
unnecessary ammunition.But Nietzsche
was wrong.There is as much reason for
an agnostic to want the benefits of an ordered civilization as there is for
anyone else to.It does not require
theistic or metaphysical justifications to see that a code of civilized conduct
benefits the great run of men, making both freedom and order possible where
otherwise they would not be.

The
difficulty is not in how to justify a morality, but in how to get people to
adhere to one.This is where religion
has its great advantage, since many people demand a divine sanction or at least
a claimed metaphysical necessity (such as “the wave of the future”) as a reason
for their commitment to basic principles.It remains to be seen whether a society could premise itself
satisfactorily on a merely prudential ethic over a long period of time.(The Communist countries don’t offer an
instance.They abjure religion, but
certainly not a sweeping metaphysic.)…………

Best
wishes,

Dwight

[The following letter was part of Dwight Murphey’s
years-long correspondence with an old friend who was a professor of
philosophy.The friend’s name isn’t
given, out of respect for the privacy of his views as reflected in Murphey’s
responses.]

May 14, 1996

Dear **********:

Your
suggestion that a new religion might be the constructive answer to trends in
the world today strikes a chord that was important to me 35 years ago.A small group of us from with the
Universalist church in Denver started
a new religion, and even held an impressive ceremony at the Iliff School of
Theology (though without any connection with that school) to ordain a minister
for it.It was to be based on something
close to Ayn Rand’s philosophy; and I read a passage from my book Emergent Man.Unfortunately, the group fell apart almost
immediately.One reason was that the
young fellow who was to be the minister decided he wanted to be “respectable”
with family and friends, with the result that he began to talk in terms of
“God” despite our general desire to become candidly agnostic or even atheist
(an openness the Unitarians and Universalists had not allowed themselves).The second reason had to do with money; I
didn’t want to spend a lot of money before we had raised it, while the other
two leading members did.So something
that I have long thought central never got off the ground, hung up on some very
mundane entanglements.Every time I
attend a funeral and hear all the nonsense that is spoken there, I think back
with sadness to my experience a few years ago.An honest and rational religion is much needed, not just for the
ceremonial occasions, but as a primary force for uplift.

Robespierre
tried one, and it is hard to see Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will without realizing that Nazism as also a
secular religion.Each of these
precedents underscores not only the great difficulty but even more so the
dangers.Movements of that sort arise
out of stress, not out of comfort; but great social stress does not lend itself
to the humaneness and love that are Christianity’s best features, when
Christianity is best conceived.The fact
that stress does not lend itself to those qualities lies at the core of my
concern about how to harness militancy.

You argue
that white consciousness does not lead to something monstrous, but to civilized
behavior.That isn’t consistent with my
experience among our contemporaries, and I wonder whether it is with your own.Most of the leftist fanatics you and I both
opposed [several years ago] were white, ******* ******** being an example.In virtually no organization with which I
have been associated have the ideals been matched by the real spirit, which has
been preponderantly venal, shallow, self-serving, and obsequiously conformist
(albeit to the “liberal” nostrums that have been respectable to the group as a
whole).I have little confidence in the
indwelling sense of justice among the people of our own time, and here I’m
speaking primarily of white Americans.Among other things, they are unable to think anything out for themselves
and to make even the most elementary distinctions.They think in half-truths and double
standards, fed to them by others.All
the while, they are smugly comfortable with what they are.Are these the people in whom you have abiding
confidence, ********?If they ever
decide to assert themselves, will they do so in a way that either you or I
would applaud?

Was it
otherwise in Germany
under Hitler?I can’t really say as to
the qualities of the average person, but I do believe there is great truth in
Lord Acton’s axiom that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.”My reason for having always
favored an individualistic society rather than a Gemeinshaft is that I have no faith in the benign effects of
subordinating individuals to any powerful authority.And yet, it was the point of Emergent Man that individuals in a free
society need to live with an elevated spiritual sense of life.Perhaps these are opposites, never to
meet.I have thought that it is possible
for them to do so if a free society could develop something like John Stuart
Mill’s “clerisy” (a word he borrowed from Coleridge)—an intellectual culture “appropriate
to a free society” that simultaneously embraces both individual freedom (with
its limits on government and all power centers) and an elevated aesthetic and
reverential sense of life.

Maybe the
rise of this “new intellectual” (a term Rand employed)
is very much the same thing as your suggestion of a possible new religion.As you and I both know, “intellectual” in the
best sense hasn’t much to do with what we call “the intellectual.”

You’ll
notice that here we are talking ideas and spiritual forces without regard to
racial or historical or cultural continuity.If Europe and America
are to become peopled by mixtures from all parts of the world, the hope will
have to lie in ideas and spiritual forces.Many “free market libertarians” think in these terms, without worrying
about underlying roots.I hope they are
right.But there is much reason to doubt
whether those particular ideas and spiritual forces will resonate within the
multiethnic cauldron.If the cauldron is
inevitable, do we have any choice but to appeal to those ideas and spiritual
forces in the hope that they will in fact resonate, even though we harbor great
doubts about whether they will?If we
become deculturated and deracinated, what choice do we have?

Your idea
of the perpetuation of a way of life within secret societies makes sense to me
only to the extent that it would cause the cauldron ultimately to embrace,
itself, that way of life.Otherwise,
what do a few secret societies, perpetuating “while consciousness,” amount to in
a world of 10 to 15 billion people, virtually all non-white?What would be the point of keeping a way of
life alive for centuries without such a hope that the whole would embrace the
ideas thus kept alive?(A serious
question, too, is how such a white diaspora, maintaining a powerful sense of
self-identity while “in the wilderness,” is even possible.You yourself say that “our own people no
longer give those traditions credence.”Since they don’t, are they the ones who can in any meaningful way go underground?)

If nothing
can be done, and I don’t see how it can be, what we are left with is that the
world will simply go its own way, for whatever good and bad that brings.The things we cherish will pass off and new
things will take their place.We can’t
really tell where the world is going, and things may play out much better than
we think in our foreboding.Or much worse.One
nice thing, ******, is that it will be for future generations to worry about,
not us.

I’ve been
continuing my reading on America’s
place in world trade, now and in the foreseeable future.That’s a big subject, but at least it is more
finite than what we’ve been discussing.

Best
wishes,

Dwight

[The follow excerpt is from a letter Dwight Murphey wrote to
a friend, an evangelical Christian, dated August 11, 1977.]

Dear *************:

……………..

Certainly
if anyone can make Christianity appealing, you and my grandmother can.You emphasize the attribute of love; my
grandmother emphasizes the promise of eternal life.

You
indicated at the last dinner, though, that you were once a skeptic.If so, you can understand my own inability to
believe Christian doctrine.There was a
time when I was a pantheist, until I realized that a reverence for nature is
not the same thing as belief in a teleological God.I still thrill to the beauties of the Kansas
sky or to the lush majesty of the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado
(in which we spent a couple of days last weekend), but I no longer think of my
love of those things as love for a God.So far as a teleological God is concerned, I just have to say that I
don’t know.I wouldn’t say definitely
there isn’t one, since the infinite is so vast and our
understanding so small.But neither
would I say there is one; belief for me is impossible unless my mind is
convinced, too, from the evidence.If
there is a God, He has created too wide an epistemological gulf.

Of course,
there is a difference between believing in a God and believing in Christianity
as such.You and my grandmother make
Christianity an exalting faith, a source of meaning, promise and love.But you probably realize yourself that you do
this by a process of selectivity.There
is much in Christianity that is debasing, and there are so many forms of
Christianity that there is great ambiguity in using the generic term
“Christianity” without qualification.You see real value in it, but Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth show the other side of it.

One of the
last things I would want to do is to argue against your faith.I realize that in the absence of such a faith
there is a real question of life’s meaning.We are frail reeds, and I wouldn’t want the responsibility of taking a
sense of cosmic connectedness away from you.But for myself, I see no choice but to value life andbeauty for their own sakes, without
more.You mentioned the undependability
of this—as if my wife and children were taken from me.But that is the reality of it.They can be, just as the niece of a lady down
the street was paralyzed from the neck down by a fall from her “jungle gym” the
other day.By pure accident, that little
girl’s life has been changed to one of years of misery.I would change such a reality if I could—but
I can’t.Both for good and for bad, we
are reality-bound.And the good deserves
emphasizing; our reality shouldn’t be thought of entirely in terms of
pathos.The little girl’s broken life
isn’t the whole story, even if it is a terrible part of it.Perhaps the greatest part of man’s dignity is
the ability to live despite mortality and tragedy.

What a
pleasure it is knowing you!I count that as one of the meaning-giving
features of my life.